Haunted no more: Season 4 of 'The Bear' confronts its ghosts

Since its debut in 2022, The Bear has been a haunted show. The ghosts aren't paranormal visitors but a collection of regrets, fears, and traumas as diverse as the series' many characters. Each individual is trailed by a destructive shadow, ready to sabotage any progress toward being a less dysfunctional person.

Sometimes the haunting is an attempt at a pressure-relieving punchline; sometimes it's just a gut-punch. Either way, the way characters grapple with their never-quite-buried losses deftly teach the audience something about the trajectory of heartbreak, the punishing nature of anxiety, depression, and addiction, and what it takes to heal.

Still, Season 3 pushed the conceit of haunting to its limit, leaning into a repetitive emotional deadlock over the course of 10 episodes. The audience watched as chef Carmy Berzatto, played by Jeremey Allen White, remained stuck in his head, and mired in memories of working for an abusive boss.

But Season 4 delivers the audience from this psychological spiral, and not just for Carmy.

Beyond Carmy's determined effort to make space for other people's feelings — hell, even their existence — numerous characters get a meaningful chance to confront the ghosts that haunt them.

An avoidant Syd (Ayo Edebiri) makes the decision (and the phone call) she's been dreading. Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) figures out his place in his own family as Tiff (Gillian Jacobs) marries Frank (Josh Hartnett). He also gets the chance to tell Carmy about the guilt he felt when Mikey (Jon Bernthal) died by suicide. Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis) makes a tearful apology to Carmy for decades of parental neglect, among other regrets.

Opportunities like these become key to the characters' healing, masterfully revealing how recovery from addiction, trauma, and emotional damage is possible.

Kassi Diwa-Kite, a licensed marriage and family therapist at BetterHelp who has watched all four seasons of The Bear, told Mashable that the series' latest outing "absolutely" felt less haunted. She says that's primarily because the characters are slowly embracing their personal and professional identities, which requires self-awareness and emotional regulation they didn't previously possess. She adds that the characters develop a curiosity about themselves and the patterns they seek to break that ultimately empowers them.

As a result, "that hauntedness has to start sliding away because they're coming more into themselves," says Diwa-Kite.

Not every character goes on the same journey as Carmy, Syd, Donna, and Richie. Mashable's Belen Edwards makes the convincing case that Season 4 failed Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas), who is mostly seen trying to cook a certain pasta dish in under three minutes.

Whether or not this makes for critically-acclaimed television is also a concern. Some critics felt Season 4 still stalled in terms of narrative momentum and lacked urgency, even if it was an improvement on the show's third installment.

Yet watching key players each chart a unique, if not straightforward, path toward happiness and redemption remains special to behold. It all happens in a world absent of therapy- and wellness-speak, too. There's nothing wrong with those conventions; they help countless people inch toward recovery every day. Still, there's something simple and relatable about Carmy's refrain throughout Season 4: "I'm trying."

After three seasons of focusing only on what he can accomplish in the kitchen, Carmy slogs through being fully present in his life, visibly uncomfortable with finding and saying the words people need to hear. He stutters and staggers, but manages to make progress.

Carmy shows up on Claire's (Molly Gordon) doorstep months after having literally ghosted her early in their romantic relationship. Pressed on why he became so fearful of intimacy, he finally blurts out an apology.

When Carmy realizes in a separate scene that it took weeks for him to meet his newborn niece, he more calmly summons an apology to his sister Sugar (Abby Elliott) for failing to show up.

Diwa-Kite particularly appreciated Carmy's arc in Season 4 because the character begins to make the connections that have long eluded him: He escaped to culinary school after growing up with an absent father and a mother addicted to alcohol, then found himself in an abusive professional relationship. Now that he wants a different future, it might not look pretty or feel easy.

"Recovery from trauma is going to be clumsy," Diwa-Kite says, noting that she appreciated how the show depicts Carmy's process. "Just let it be messy. That's where the healing is happening."

While Season 4 is full of moments in which characters makes more fulfilling, grounded choices, there is perhaps none as beautiful as the scene that unfolds when Richie and Tiff's daughter, Eva (Annabelle Toomey), hides under a large table during the celebration of her mother's marriage to Frank.

Afraid to dance with Frank in front of an audience of adults, she refuses to come out. Soon every major character — and some minor ones, too — find themselves under the table with Eva, sharing their fears, one-by-one. Carmy admits that his is the "opposite of chaos," and math. Richie gets a chuckle by saying his fear is artificial intelligence, specifically the Singularity. Frank confesses that he's afraid of heights.

On it goes like that, as many adults with a history of trauma reassure a little girl about whom they care deeply that it's normal to feel fear.

"There was so much healing that you could see among all of those adults," Diwa-Kite says.

The episode, entitled "Bears," is an unexpected bookend to Season 2's "Fishes," which depicted another family gathering that couldn't be more different.

"Fishes" was a tense hourlong observation of family dysfunction and the toll that it takes on everyone it touches. "Bears" demonstrates how loving relationships, even when they're imperfect, can sustain people who otherwise feel broken, and can possibly achieve generational healing.

"If this were a real girl, imagine the core memory that was created for her in that moment," Diwa-Kite says of Eva. "She will remember that forever. She will draw on that experience forever."

The impromptu community that came together for Eva during that scene echoes an overarching theme of Season 4: People heal in community and through the relationships they've built, Diwa-Kite says.

None of this means that Season 5 will be easy-going for any of the characters.

Indeed, the final episode of Season 4 was fraught as Carmy, Syd, and Richie spent a half-hour arguing, in close-ups, over Carmy's imminent departure from the restaurant. Carmy says he wants to learn who he is when he's not trying to escape his pain. Richie and Syd, though, suspect he's running away — again.

Whether or not Carmy will truly find himself might seem like a gamble. But, then again, Carmy spent the season repairing the relationships that matter most to him rather than severing those ties, and seems more than ready to instead walk away from his proverbial ghosts.